By SERRA TOPAL
“The Fine Art of Correction -Why We Overestimate Setup”
“You are sitting on a plane from London to New York. How much of time is it sticking to the flight path, do you think? 90 percent of the time? 80 percent of the time? The correct answer is never. Sitting beside the window, gazing out at the edge of the wing, you can watch the jumpy little ailerons–they’re there to make constant adjustments to the flight path. Thousands of times per second, the autopilot recalculates the gap between where the plane is and where it should be and issues corrective instructions.
“Our lives work like a plane or a car. We’d rather they didn’t–that they ran according to the plan, foreseeable and undisturbed. Then we’d only have to focus on the set-up, the optimal starting point. We’d arrange things perfectly at the beginning–education, career, love life, family-and reach our goals as planned. Of course, as I’m sure you know, it doesn’t work like that. Our lives are exposed to constant turbulence, and we spend much of our time battling crosswinds and the unforeseen caprices of the weather. Yet we still behave like naïve fair-weather pilots: we overestimate the role of the set-up and systematically underestimate the role of correction.
“The art of auto-correction following take-off. After billions of years, nature knows it too. As cells divide, copying errors are perpetually being made in the genetic material, so in every cell there are molecules retroactively correcting these errors. Without this process of DNA repair, we’d die of cancer hours after conception. Our immune system follows the same principle. There’s no master plan, because threats are impossible to predict. Hostile viruses and bacteria are constantly mutating, and our defenses can only function through perpetual correction.
“The most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the good life is a stable state or condition. Wrong. The good life is only achieved through constant readjustment.
“In other areas, unfortunately, we’re even less willing to correct ourselves. Our school system is largely geared toward the set-up: the emphasis on the factual knowledge and certifications makes it seem like life is primarily about getting the best possible grades and giving our careers the best possible jump-start.
“The same phenomenon is apparent in the development of our characters. What do you think: was it the set-up–the perfect genes, an ideal upbringing, a first-class education- that made a person so wise? Or was it acts of correction, of constant work on their own issues and shortcomings, a gradual elimination of these inadequacies from their lives?
“The upshot? We’ve got to get rid of the stigma attached to correction. There’s no such thing as the ideal training. There’s more than one life goal. There’s no perfect business strategy, no optimal stock portfolio, no one right job. They’re all myths. The truth is that you begin with one set-up and then constantly adjust it. The more complicated the world becomes, the less important your starting point is. So don’t invest all your resources into the perfect set-up–at work or in your personal life. Instead, practice the art of correction by revising things that aren’t quite working–swiftly and without feeling guilty.”
Rolf Dobelli, The Art of the Good Life
